Letture del mese #28— Gennaio 2017

“You can lose faith in everything, religion and God, women and love, good and evil, war and peace. You name it. But the percentage will always stand fast.”(…)“It’s the only way to live,” Gronevelt said. “You have to live going with the percentage. Otherwise life is not worthwhile. Always remember that,” he told Cully. “Everything you do in life use percentage as your god.”

Your best bet is to lay back and play it cool.

Friends of Osano and knowing that he would approve, they had a keg of beer and a portable bar on the bus. They arrived drunk for the funeral. Osano would have been delighted.

However, the persona that took root and flourished over the next forty years was that of the drug-crazed Wild Man of journalism, more rebel hoodlum than iconoclast, more buffoon than satirist.(…)Which he was. He was an alcoholic, drug addict, and a hell-raiser, but he was also a brilliant writer and craftsman of the language, facts that are still overshadowed by his Wild Man persona. This is the persona most people think of when they hear the name Hunter S. Thompson, if they know the name at all. And that is a shame. He was first and always a writer in the best and highest sense of the word, in which writing is a vocation, not an occupation. Everything else was secondary. Drugs, family, lovers, friends, sex, adventure, they all came after writing.

He looked at letter writing as not only a way to keep in touch and debate ideas, but as a writing exercise, so that when he wasn’t sleeping or in the bar with friends, he was writing.

I have learned to appreciate words. Whatever else brings you all here, I hope that you all recognize my father’s genius for using the English language. He is an artist, which to me means he is a magician with words, he makes them express his vision of the world in a way that cannot be attained by study and effort and even practice, though he has done all these things. It is more than mechanical mastery, it is expressing the living essence of a scene or a person directly.

Hunter could be a monster.

I’m not angry at Hunter very often about his suicide. I am angry, though, that he did not stay around for Will. [il figlio di Juan]

But the real problem was that Hunter couldn’t focus on writing. He would find a million ways to put it off. There were football games to watch, and if not football, then basketball. There was the news. Or maybe he had stayed up two nights in a row and was so exhausted that there was no question of useful work that night. There were people coming over most every afternoon and evening to say hello, watch a game, talk politics. There were long phone calls. There were always drugs.(…)Cocaine and booze didn’t even qualify as drugs, they were a staple of his daily diet, like pink grapefruit, orange juice, and vitamins.Eventually a combination of shame and fear finally drove him to the typewriter late at night. The next morning there might be a page, but sometimes there were only a few sentences.It was hard to watch. I felt terrible for him. Hunter was a perfectionist, and he was a damn fine writer, and I know it killed him to realize he wasn’t going to write anything, hit the power switch on the IBM Selectric typewriter, and retreat to the bedroom, leaving an empty page.Other times, though, when there was movement and energy, it was a wonderful thing to be a part of.

(…) this book is about the art of reading for the sake of increased understanding.

Not only is analytical reading work — it is lonely work.

If you ask a living teacher a question, he will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what he says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking him what he means. If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. In this respect a book is like nature or the world. When you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking and analysis yourself.

Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? (…) Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author.

The big money has always been in processing foods, not selling them whole (…)

Depending on how we spend them, our food dollars can either go to support a food industry devoted to quantity and convenience and “value” or they can nourish a food chain organized around values—values like quality and health. Yes, shopping this way takes more money and effort, but as soon you begin to treat that expenditure not just as shopping but also as a kind of vote—a vote for health in the largest sense—food no longer seems like the smartest place to economize.

That’s what I mean by the recommendation to “eat food,” which is not quite as simple as it sounds. For while it used to be that food was all you could eat, today there are thousands of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages elaborately festooned with health claims, which brings me to another, somewhat counterintuitive, piece of advice: If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims.

These changes have given us the Western diet that we take for granted: lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything—except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. That such a diet makes people sick and fat we have known for a long time.

Sooner or later, everything solid we’ve been told about the links between our diet and our health seems to get blown away in the gust of the most recent study.

Gyorgy Scrinis, who coined the term “nutritionism,” suggests that the most important fact about any food is not its nutrient content but its degree of processing. He writes that “whole foods and industrial foods are the only two food groups I’d consider including in any useful food ‘pyramid.’” In other words, instead of worrying about nutrients, we should simply avoid any food that has been processed to such an extent that it is more the product of industry than of nature.

A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the same body in the long natural history of our species.

The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
A. J. Jacobs
2005

This is one of those times. As an editor, I have to read each of the articles in my section about forty-three times, until the sentences are sucked of all meaning and become weird little black marks on the page.

It’s confirmation of something I’ve been toying with for a couple of months: one secret to being a successful know-it-all is extreme confidence. Just state your fact loud and proud, even if, as is the case with me, the details are often faded and jumbled up. As my friend the financial analyst once told me about his line of work: sometimes right, sometimes wrong, always certain.